Many revenue cycle partnerships begin with strong alignment and shared intent, but over time, trust thins, clarity crumbles, and transparency tails off. Solutions providers and healthcare organizations see expectations shift unevenly as communication becomes scarce and accountability starts to live between organizations rather than within them.
What gets lost in the drift is ownership. Ownership in how work is approached, how decisions are made, and how results are shared across both organizations.
During IAOP’s “Breaking Bad Outsourcing Relationships” panel, Vee Healthtek’s Mohini Dhanekula, Senior Managing Director, CDI, and Divya Devi, Client Operations Director, emphasized that ownership must be intentionally embedded into partnership design and day-to-day execution, from expectations to performance visibility. They shared that successful relationships are built on 3 self-reinforcing foundations that operationalize ownership:
- Shared accountability for outcomes between the healthcare organization and the solutions provider
- Transparency that enables trust from both sides
- An operating model where both organizations remain focused on the same goals, not parallel priorities
Together, these principles create the conditions for ownership to be sustained and translated into measurable performance through the partnership.
Revenue Cycle Success Starts Where Task Completion Ends
Revenue cycle is no longer a series of disconnected administrative functions. Front-end workflows influence denials. Documentation quality impacts reimbursement accuracy. Payer communication affects cash acceleration. Operational inefficiencies in one area quickly create financial consequences elsewhere.
In this environment, execution is the baseline expectation. Ownership is what determines whether execution translates into improved outcomes.
In revenue cycle partnerships, ownership means understanding how individual activities affect larger financial outcomes. It means identifying issues before they become problems, recommending improvements when opportunities arise, and viewing performance through the lens of business results rather than production metrics alone. The partnerships creating the most value are built around that mindset.
Clients are not buying task completion. They’re buying your confidence. The difference is between completing the task and owning the task.
- Mohini Dhanekula, Senior Managing Director, CDI
Strong Ownership Depends on Transparency
Operational friction rarely begins with a major issue. More often, it develops gradually through unclear expectations, fragmented communication, or gaps in accountability. After all, by the time it feels like a problem, it’s been a problem for too long. These signals appear when expectations around visibility are not aligned on both sides. In effective partnerships, trust is built on a foundation of mutual transparency.
On the revenue cycle partner side, this means showing what’s happening behind the curtain. Solutions providers need to make their work visible through clear reporting, consistent operational updates, and proactive identification of risks and opportunities. There can be no “black box.”
On the health system side, trust is demonstrated by focusing oversight on outcomes rather than activity. Instead of monitoring every task in a workflow, the most successful organizations concentrate on whether agreed-upon financial and operational results are being achieved, and whether performance is improving over time. This shift reduces oversight burden and gives internal teams back time to focus on higher-value priorities.
This isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Trust, after all, is a two-way street. When revenue cycle partners are transparent about execution and performance, health systems are better able to trust outcomes without the need to over-manage the process. Otherwise, oversight expands into day-to-day activity management, slowing decision-making and reducing the very capacity gains the partnership was meant to create. At that point, they have effectively outsourced the work and insourced the stress.
Trust erodes when teams are monitored for activity rather than trusted with outcomes.
- Divya Devi, Client Operations Director
The Best Partnerships Feel Embedded within the Organization
Operational performance depends on coordination across workflows, technologies, and teams. When communication is inconsistent and information is siloed, inefficiencies compound quickly.
In these cases, moving beyond a buyer-vendor mindset is essential because the strongest relationships are built on shared understanding of priorities, constraints, and definitions of success. Over time, the most effective organizations invest in deeper integration across leadership and operational teams, creating a structure where performance discussions are continuous and both sides are actively engaged in improving, not just reporting, results.
In these models, performance is not external to the organization, but embedded in the way work is executed, reviewed, and improved. You stop asking “how is the partner doing?” and start asking, “how are we doing.”
Maintaining communication effectively and regularly is very important on both sides. Clients should think of us as an extension of their staff.
- Mohini Dhanekula, Senior Managing Director, CDI
Building a Partnership Around Ownership: A Practical Model
Building a partnership grounded in ownership requires intentional design from the start. It depends less on contract structure or stipulations and more on how the relationship is activated, governed, and operated day to day. Some tried and true advice:
1. Anchor on shared outcomes
Knowing the destination tends to help with the navigation. Define success in terms of financial and operational outcomes such as denials reduction, cash acceleration, coding accuracy, and A/R performance. When partners understand the “why” behind the work, they are better positioned to take ownership of results rather than simply executing tasks.
2. Establish transparency in execution to create trust
Include partners in relevant performance discussions, planning sessions, and operational reviews. When both sides are working from the same data and priorities, issues are identified earlier and improvement opportunities are addressed collaboratively rather than reactively. Shared data has a way of producing shared urgency.
3. Operate as a unified team
When both sides share priorities, constraints, and a common view of performance, communication shifts from status reporting to joint problem-solving. Over time, this creates a working model where improvement is continuous and both sides are actively engaged in driving outcomes, not just tracking them. Two organizations, one team.